“Sorry. You’re all knotted up here, on the back of your neck.”
“You can give yourself a whore’s bath after next playtime—that’s what we call it—but for now you’ll have to live with it.”
“The way you look and the rest of them sound, it must be playing rough. Even Eye looks banged up.”
“You’ll find out,” Stooks said.
“But you won’t like it,” Fremmy added.
From down the corridor someone began to cough.
“Cover it!” one of the women yelled. “No one wants what you got, Dommy!”
The coughing continued.
3
Some time later Pursey returned with a cart filled with pieces of half-cooked chicken, which he tossed into the cells. I ate mine and half of Hamey’s. Across from our cell, Eye dumped his bones down his shithole and shouted, “Shut up, the gang of ya! I want to sleep!”
There was a little more after-dinner talk between the cells in spite of this decree, then it died to murmurs and finally ceased. So I guess the chicken really had been dinner, and this was nighttime. Not that there was any way to tell; our barred window never showed anything but unmitigated darkness. Sometimes we got steak, sometimes chicken, once in awhile bony filets of fish. Usually, but not always, there were carrots. No sweets. Nothing that Pursey couldn’t fling through the bars, in other words. The meat was good, not the maggoty remains I would have expected in a dungeon, and the carrots were crunchy. They wanted us healthy and we all were except for Dommy, who had some sort of lung ailment, and Hamey, who never ate much and complained of the bellyache when he did.
Whether it was morning, noon, or night the gas-jets flared, but there were so few of them that Deep Maleen existed in a kind of twilight that was disorienting and depressing. If I’d had a sense of time when I came in （I hadn’t）， I would have lost it after the first twenty-four or thirty-six hours.
The places where Aaron had hit me with his limber stick stung and throbbed. I used the last of the liniment on them and it helped a little. I wiped at my face and neck. Dirt came off in clumps. At some point I slept and dreamed of Radar. She was loping along, young and strong and surrounded by a cloud of orange and black butterflies. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I woke up the long room of cells was still quiet except for snores, the occasional fart, and Dommy’s coughing. I got up and had a drink from the bucket, being careful to place my finger over the hole in the bottom of the tin cup. When I turned back to my blanket, I saw Hamey staring at me. The puffy circles under his eyes looked like bruises.
“You don’t have to berdeck me. I take that back. I’m for it no matter what. They toss me around like a bag of grain, and that’s just playtime. What’s it going to be like when the Fair One comes around?”
“I don’t know.” I thought to ask him what the Fair One was, but I had an idea it might be a blood-sport tourney, like cage fighting. Thirty-two was, as I’d already realized, divisible all the way down. As for “playtime”？ Practice. A run-up to the main event. There was something else I was more curious about.
“I met a boy and a man on my way to Lilimar. They were, you know, gray people.”
“Ain’t they most of em,” Hamey said. “Ever since Flight Killer came back from the Dark Well.” He smiled bitterly.
There was a ton of backstory in that one sentence, and I wanted to know what it was, but for the time being I stuck with the gray man who’d been hopping along on his crutch. “They were coming from Seafront—”
“Were they now?” Hamey whispered without much interest.
“And the man said something to me. First he called me whole man—”
“Well ain’tcha? Not a trace of gray to you. Plenty of dirt but no gray.”
“Then he said, ‘Which of em did your mother flip her skirts for to leave you fair of face?’ Do you have any idea what that means?”
Hamey sat up and stared at me, wide-eyed. “Where in the name of every orange butterfly that ever flew did you come from?”
Across from us, Eye grunted and shifted in his cell.
“Do you know what it means or not?”
He sighed. “Galliens ruled Empis since time out of mind, you know that much, don’tcha?”
I flapped my hand for him to go on.
“Thousands and thousands of years.”
Again it was like having two languages in my brain, meshing so perfectly they were almost one.
“In a way they still do,” Hamey said. “Flight Killer being who he is and all… if he is still a he, and not turned into some creature from the well… but… where the fuck was I?”